What is Vertcoin?

Vertcoin (VTC) is a cryptocurrency project launched in 2014. It is based on Bitcoin, and it aims to provide a service in the original spirit of Bitcoin technology as was outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto in his now legendary Whitepaper. Vertcoin is a decentralized currency that is really, entirely owned by the users, a coin for the people.

According to the vision of the Vertcoin team, the cryptocurrency craze has done some damage to the initial intentions of the cryptocurrency environment as a whole. The introduction of ASIC miners has had an unintended consequence: extreme centralization, which goes against the founding principles of Bitcoin technology.

ASIC mining and the resulting centralization create a situation where a small number of big players control a given cryptocurrency. Worse, big players with a lot of money invested tend to pursue profit over technological and social progress.

How Does Vertcoin Work?

VTC can only be obtained by mining and will not have an ICO, pre-mine or airdrops: this allows miners to compete fairly and liberates them from having to depend on or fall victim to scammy hardware manufacturers. VTC is GPU minable and uses the ASIC resistant Lyra2RE(V2) algorithm.

The Lyra2RE(V2) algorithm is currently optimized for mining with NVidia 10 Series cards; the team is working on optimizing the code to make it profitable to use AMD GPUs as well. Miners that can be used to mine VTC are:

A previously disabled feature that has been considered again by the development team is “Stealth Addresses,” which aim to provide true privacy on the public ledger. Vertcoin also supports SegWit.

VTC can be purchased using Bitcoin on several important exchanges including Poloniex, Bittrex, and YoBit. VTC can be stored using the Vertcoin Core Wallet, the VTC Electrum Wallet and the Vertcoin web wallet (p2pool unsupported).

The maximum number of VTC is 84 million, with a block time of 2.5 minutes and a block reward of 25 coins per block. Rewards will be halved every 840 thousand blocks or approximately four years. The algorithm also retargets the difficulty every block. The consensus system of VTC is Proof-of-Work (PoW).